On Thu, 29 May 2008, Henry S. Thompson wrote:
>
> We have to set against the problems with aria: the medium- and
> long-term negative aspects of the aria- approach, which focusses on
> ease of ARIA integration in text/html environments at the expense of
> costly integration throughout the application/...+xml universe.
Just so we're clear as to the scales here, the text/html environment
consists of some 100 billion pages or so (to a first order approximation),
while the application/...+xml universe consists of about 5 million pages.
(This is based upon a study of several billion documents I did last year.)
We should weigh the costs against those numbers before optimising for the
XML case.
> From my perspective, the cost of aria: in the text/html environment is
> modest, manageable, and declining over time, whereas the cost of aria-
> in the application/...+xml universe is large and permanent.
The cost of aria: is that it puts up a huge barrier for migration from
HTML to XML, thus reducing the value of the XML universe.
The cost of aria- is that it makes the W3C look silly for having designed
a namespace mechanism that it can't use.
Which do we care more about? Migrating to XML, or not looking silly?
--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'